The Carnival Liberty cruise ship is docked in Port Everglades, Florida, today, undergoing what the cruise line calls a thorough scrubbing after a stomach illness spread to nearly 700 passengers and crew members. According to the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Florida, it could be one of the largest outbreaks in the history of the cruise ship industry.

My favorite spin from this past weekend’s coverage is from a woman named Christine Fischer, a cruise industry spokeswoman. She told the Sun-Sentinel’s reporter that while these kinds of outbreaks receive a lot of publicity, they really are far less common than they seem.

Of course! Why didn’t I realize it’s the media’s fault for making this outbreak seem so bad? After all, who else could be to blame for nearly 25 percent of the people onboard vomiting and suffering from diarrhea for days on end? Certainly not the industry that reports dozens of viral outbreaks onboard its ships every year to America’s national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And let’s be clear about exactly what an outbreak means to people onboard a cruise ship. “Our cabin steward was struck, and we didn’t have anybody to clean our cabin for five days,” a Colorado woman told the Sun-Sentinel. She added that she and her husband spent two days vomiting in that very same cabin.

That’s sickening stuff, but not as sickening as the industry spin that these kinds of outbreaks are minimal at best. Ms. Fischer, to support her argument, told the Sun-Sentinal that these kinds of cruise-ship outbreaks affect only about one in every 3,600 passengers. It’s as if she were making the case that diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain are just a natural possibility when you decide to vacation at sea.

Not so with yacht charter. By my own estimates there are around a quarter-million weeks of yacht charter vacations being booked around the world each year, which means somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million guests. Even if there were to be a “yacht-wide” outbreak of a stomach illness, it would affect only the guests and crew onboard a single charter yacht, which by international law can usually carry 12 guests maximum. If you assume the yacht has 12 crew, too (and even that’s a stretch), then the largest number of people who could ever be affected by a “yacht-wide” outbreak of a stomach virus is 24. Compare that to 700 on the Carnival ship, and the odds in your favor during a yacht charter are staggering.

I’m sure cruise-ship lobbyists like Ms. Fischer wish they had yacht charter’s statistics on their disposal, because it’s much easier to defend a style of cruising vacation where you’re actually likely to stay healthy, where you’re not putting yourself onto a floating city full of germs, where if there is for some reason a problem, you won’t be left to vomit in your cabin for a few days without so much as a fresh towel while the ship continues on its way to keep the rest of the paying passengers happy.

Yet again, I am reminded about just how much better yacht charter vacations are than cruise ship trips. Sometimes, it’ s not even about the personalized service, the flexible itineraries, and the crowd-free coves. Sometimes, it’s just about the basics, like being able to stay healthy while you’re trying to relax at sea.

I learned recently from management company Northrop & Johnson that the 153-foot crewed motoryacht Argyll now has zero-speed stabilizers.

For those of you who don’t know about them, zero-speed stabilizers are a technological advancement that allow a yacht captain to keep a boat stable both under way and while at anchor. Practically speaking, this means the yacht will not rock from side to side–not even a little bit–whether you’re cruising or sitting down to dinner on the aft deck.

Many new, larger motoryachts are being built with these kinds of stabilizers because people seem to love them (especially charter guests). Argyll is one of a handful of existing yachts that are adding the stabilizers at a substantial cost, well into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Are they worth it? I think so. I experienced zero-speed stabilizers while onboard the 161-foot motoryacht Teleost as a guest of management company Fraser Yachts Worldwide, and I must admit it was a pretty cool effect. I was sitting in the pilothouse with Capt. Nigel Burnet as we cruised through the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, and I asked him whether he felt it had been worth the money to add the stabilizers. “See for yourself,” he replied before pushing a button on the helm that turned the stabilizers off. The yacht began rolling gently from side to side–no more so than any other yacht I’d ever cruised onboard, but in a way that felt far less comfortable to me than I’d been just moments earlier with the zero-speed stabilizers on.

I later learned that Capt. Burnet had also been using the stabilizers to keep the yacht level in the water while we were dining at anchor, and when he was making turns around the ends of islands. Only in retrospect did I realize how little the yacht had been rolling in those situations. It was a matter of my being so comfortable, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

In time, I think these zero-speed stabilizers will become like on-deck hot tubs and sky lounge cinemas onboard high-end motoryachts: items that used to be unique onboard just a handful of boats, but that eventually transition into the status of “expected amenities.”

As well they should. They’re a great way to help guests feel even more at home when they book a charter at sea.

I’m reading this interesting little book called Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Industry, by Ross A. Klein. In the chapter titled “The Myth of the All-Inclusive Vacation,” Klein explains that the money cruise ships shake from your pockets after you’ve paid for your cabin is actually the ships’ biggest source of revenue.

As an example, Klein talks about Wall Street analysis that went on during a 1999 takeover competition for Norwegian Cruise Line. Apparently, Wall Street felt the cruise line had lower than average levels of onboard revenue, which back in 1999 was beteween $220 and $233 per person, per day.

That’s right–the cruise ships that promote “all-inclusive” vacations actually use their onboard services, casinos, bars, art auctions, excursions, and more to get an average of $1,500 per person more out of you after you’ve booked your weeklong trip. And remember, those are 1999 figures. It’s seven years later. Certainly, the number is likely to have gone up.

This is yet another reason why I prefer yacht charter to cruise ship travel. If you just want to talk dollars and cents, yacht charter is a much more financially honest vacation option. Your all-inclusive charters are actually all-inclusive (except for crew gratuity, which you decide yourself instead of having it tacked onto your bill the way many cruise ships do). In most cases, all-inclusive charters even include things like alcohol and scuba diving.

And, even when your charter is not all-inclusive, a reputable charter broker can give you a very good idea before you book about how much you’re likely to spend on things like food, fuel, and other typical add-ons. Nobody’s going to try to nickel and dime an extra $1,500 per person out of you after you set sail. If there’s a drink handed to you with an umbrella in it, it’s not going to show up on a bill later next to a charge for $22 “with souvenir glass.”

I have a chart that reflects these kinds of pricing differences in the “charter cost” chapter of my new book, Have the Whole Boat: The Insider’s Guide to Private Yacht Charter Vacations. You can take a look at the chart for free by clicking here.

Money matters when it comes to planning your vacation at sea. So does honesty in marketing. You want to book a cruise that will actually give you the vacation you dream of, for the price you expect to pay before you set sail.

And for that, more now than ever, you are wisest to cruise onboard a private yacht.